The Secret Way to War, with a preface by by Frank Rich, includes Mark Danner's
strongly argued analysis of the Downing Street Memo as well as the
complete text of the memo and seven other leaked British documents.
Collectively, the documents show the members of Tony Blair's government
and their counterparts in Washington struggling to find legal and
political rationales and strategies for regime change in Iraq.

The United States went to war in Iraq to eliminate the threat from
Saddam Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction-- which turned out not to
exist. As the war drags on, the strange case of the weapons that were
not there remains a matter of bitter debate, for it underscores the
fact that the goals and the motivations of the Bush administration
officials who argued for war are still largely obscure. Yet in fact
there exists crucial and little-publicized evidence that lets us
understand the secretive, even deceptive, way that the the US launched
a war of choice in the Middle East in March 2003.

At the
beginning of May 2005, just before the British elections, the London Times published the "Downing Street Memo," the leaked secret minutes
of a July 2002 meeting of senior British intelligence, foreign policy,
and security officials. The memo made clear that eight months before
the invasion of Iraq, President Bush had already decided on war. The
British officials who attended the meeting were told that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," that the
US wanted to avoid consulting the UN, and that few plans were being
made for the aftermath of war.

Largely ignored in the US press for
weeks afterward, The New York Review of Books published the memo in
its entirety with an extensive commentary by award-winning journalist
Mark Danner. Danner explains how the memo clarifies the broader-- and
largely concealed-- history of the events leading up to the Iraq war.
He shows that the Bush and Blair administrations advocated the
resumption of UN weapons inspections as a means not to avoid war but to
ensure it. Most importantly, Danner argues that in the face of the
memo's clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress
still have not held the administration responsible.